What we are reading | Issue No: 11

Asim Rafiqui

“Why Great Art Is Always A Political One”

This is a stunning documentary by Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar– very unique in its structure and arrangement, that features Narayan Surve and the artist Sudhir Patwardhan. It places them squarely in the period of working-class struggles and concerns, which is lovely to see. This is a lovely film, and you can hear Sudhir Patwardhan explaining his work.

Paintings by Sudhir Patwardhan

Can you discover ‘an influence’ after the fact?

What do you call someone who seems to embody your eye, your sensibility, and yet you had never seen his / her work, and yet, when you now see it, you see the ‘influence’…the similarities?

Is he confronting the same questions? Is he seeing this incredibly complex and multi-layered world with the same desire to depict it as close to that complexity as possible?

I am going through these images–gorgeous, striking, unique, and no, I refuse to give you some ‘European’ reference to understand them in any way. They are Patwardhan’s and his alone. But I want to make them as photographs. They are the photographs I would make if in Mumbai. It is beautiful stuff. It makes me want to go and make photographs.